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To this point, I've presented a working definition of organizations and explained
just how common they are. Now I want to sell you on the course.
Learning about organizations, reflecting on how they operate, and considering a
variety of means by which they can be managed is an important skill most
everyone in today's society should develop.
We live in an organizational society and many of the problems we confront are
organizational in nature. We need to better understand and manage
organizations if we are to evolve as a society.
This course attempts to provide you with such training.
It's an introductory course on organizations that helps you grapple with
the complexity of institutional life. The course focuses on actual cases of
non-profits, educational institutions, government agencies, private firms, and
the policies aimed at changing them. The course ma, material is designed for
advanced undergraduates, master students and PHDs interested in organizations.
So, lets cut to the chase. What's the utility that scores to
managers, policy makers and analyst? Why should you care?
Again, organizations are everywhere. You can't change society or understand
much of it without knowing something about organizations and how they work.
The social reality of organizational life is pretty messy and complex, and we need a
conceptual framework or a set of them to make to help us make sense of it.
For example, what should you pay attention to?
What matters, what does not when you look at an organization, and the reforms or the
problems it confronts? Where do you begin if you want to study
and change them? This course offers you conceptual
frameworks and tools, by which to do this. Through this course, you'll better
understand the problems that organizations like schools, universities, non profits
and private firms confront. There are so many problems that arise in
an organization, that it's hard to rattle them all off.
But here, we can name a few. First, organizations confront problems of
defining objectives, like goals. It's not always clear what their mission
is or if they have conflicting ones. Organizations struggle to get people to
show up, and to perform services like tasks.
Students in required classes are difficult to show up.
Third, organizations worry about the coordination of lots of people trying to
accomplish these tasks, and even how to coordinate different tasks with one
another. Here, the problem is how to have upstream
and downstream kinds of activities coordinated or even how to accomplish each
task on their own. There's always a concern of drawing
necessary resources from the environment. This could be a fifth kind of concern.
Organizational inputs, like money or revenue, materials, knowledge, are highly
important for the functioning of an organization.
Then organizations also have to worry about their outputs.
Dispensing ideas, products, and funds the environment, and making sure that the
environment reacts to them. There's also the concern with selecting,
training, and replacing members as participants move through these
organizations. Participants and organizations grow old.
They graduate. They die.
People turn over, they find other jobs. Replacing them is a key function or
concern of every organization. Organizations even worry about the
relations they have with other firms. Like ties to neighbors and, and fit within
an environment. For example Walmart can't just plop down
in any particular neighborhood. They have to consider the environment and
their fit. This course exposes you to a variety of
actual cases of organizations and theories that help make sense of what you've
observed. Through this course you'll learn there's
nothing more practical than a good theory. Many of you have, have organizational
experiences of your own, and they'll be of great value in this course.
Think of them as experiences from which you, you've developed different accounts
or interpretations. In most cases, your accounts focus on
certain features of the organizational context.
You attribute causal force to certain elements and certain actors over others.
And you come to certain conclusions as to why things happen the way they did.
Your accounts are in many ways a folk theory, a proto theory.
But as we all know, people have different accounts of the same phenomenon.
And the same explanation or way of seeing organized life cannot be universally
applied. In many regards it's not enough to adopt
one theory or one perspective on everything.
In whatever career you pick you will confront new problems and new situations
where you're previously generated explanation does not apply or where
another perspective is altogether needed and relevant.
This course exposes you to multiple theories of explaining and managing
organizations, why? Well it, it does so to help you develop
different accounts than you already have. To help you think in new ways about
organization, so that when you go out and study one or manage one.
You don't just draw on rules of thumb that will likely never work in a particular
case. But adapt different ways of seeing and
thinking about the phenomenon. So this course provides you with different
perspectives you may not have considered before.
When you look at an organization now, it may seem unbearably complex and composed
of an endless array of features. Through theories, or organizational
theories, you'll learn to listen for different kinds of music and all that
noise. Each theory pics up on different features
of organized life and renders them into explanatory nar, narratives you can use.
And by implication the hope is that you'll learn different and perhaps better ways of
managing than you already have in your possession.
So this course is designed to enrich your understanding of organizational phenomena
and your experiences in them. You won't be given a laundry list of
advice or rules of thumb that soon go out of date or fail to apply in the novel
situations you confront. There are no sil, silver bullets solutions
here. You'll be given a set of tools, ways of
seeing, ways of understanding, and ways of managing the complex reality of
organizations. I'll leave it up to you and the actual
organization cases that interest you to discern which tool or combination of them
best applies.